g that seemed well to say or
do, and so she, too, remained silent until presently the elder woman
turned to her again and spoke more gently.

"Don't mind me, my dear. I'm in great trouble--on Mark's account. I've
had an awful blow, and I don't know yet how it will all come out. I
don't want to be unjust to Felix Brand, but I can't help thinking that
he's largely responsible for it. I know he was for the beginning of
the whole thing. And I've found out that poor Mark's not the only
one--" she was talking off into the air again, oblivious of the girl
beside her--"who's paying for the consequences of Felix Brand's
private pleasures. It's time he began to pay for some of them
himself."

Her voice, quivering with the indignation and anguish she was trying
to conceal, subsided into a muttering whose words Henrietta could not
distinguish and finally she lapsed into silence. At the door of the
building in which was Brand's suite of offices she said to her
companion:

"I'm going up with you, my dear, if you'll let me. I want to see Mr.
Brand without delay and if he isn't here yet I'll wait for him."

Miss Marne, busy at her desk with the morning's mail, heard sounds
from her employer's private room during Mrs. Fenlow's call that
betokened a change in the friendly relations formerly existing between
them. She could hear the woman's voice raised in what seemed to be
bitter denunciation and the man's replying in sneering tones. These
seemed so unlike Felix Brand that she paused for a moment in her work,
astonished at the unaccustomed note. During the last few weeks she had
seen him several times give way to sudden temper, but even these
outbursts, unprecedented though they were in her experience of him,
had not seemed to her so foreign to his usual affable manner and
pleasant speech as did the harsh, sarcastic antagonism of the voice in
which she could hear him speaking to Mrs. Fenlow.

"But it must be Mr. Brand," thought his secretary, looking in puzzled
wonder at the door into his room, "for there's surely nobody else in
there."

As she gazed, held by her surprise, a letter in her hands, the
wrathful voices rose again, now one, then the other, and in Mrs.
Fenlow's she presently caught the words, "Hugh Gordon."

At that came the sound of the man springing to his feet, of an
overturned chair rattling to the floor, of a blow upon his desk and a
loud and angry oath. The girl started with a whispered exclamation of
amazement